Amerika

Politics reminds me of bullfighting: the matador waves a cape, the bull charges, and the matador steps aside, sticking a little spear in the bull each time, eventually bleeding him into weakness, then killing him.

For a bonus to the analogy, people are usually screaming in Spanish there, too.

In American politics, they wave the flag of ideology and promise benefits. The voters — people in groups are dunces — rush forward at whatever target is offered. While the herd is congratulating itself, politicians help themselves to more of the wealth. Most will not object until too much is taken, and by that point it is too late. To mix metaphors: boiling a frog.

Right now the Left is bandying about numerous variations of their one and only theme, “equality,” especially on the topic of Civil Rights which is their get-out-of-jail-free card because no one wants to be styled as Hitler in the media. They have a golden ticket and they use it like a lance.

In the meantime, they are hiding from us the real story: America, like Europe, is re-segregating.

For those who remember history, which is like 500 people in North America at this point, segregation was what happened after the Civil War. The slaves were freed, and each ethnic group went its own way. This “worked,” like most bad ideas seem to succeed at first, for a time. There were thriving black communities, but when they got powerful enough to challenge the white minority, the usual diversity story played out through ethnic conflict and amusingly horrible race riots.

In the 1950s, people — still drugged on a moral superiority high after WWII — decided that segregation was wrong and that we should force people to live together. Nothing says fair and balanced quite like forcing people who resent each other to interact, right? Billions were wasted on forced school busing, redistricting and other attempts to make unequal schools (as all schools are) “equal.”

The desegregation effort hit its peak in 2016 when Barack Obama order the relocation of “the diversity” to the white suburbs, presumably to reinforce the Leftist motto of “there is no escape.”

Despite this action, and perhaps prompting it, the hardline reality is that Americans of all races have been re-segregating because all people like to live near people like them. This enables high-trust communities where you know how to behave in public, socializing is easy, and the constant background hum of low-grade inter-ethnic crime and violence diminishes, except for those pesky dudes who steal your Amazon package off your front porch during the workday.

Resegregation takes many forms, since there are now many ethnic groups (temporarily) living here, and it shocked the media who refused to recognize that, for the most part, this resegregation was voluntary and encouraged by all races, religions and ethnic groups:

More than a half century after the civil rights era, many urban neighborhoods and institutions in American life remain unintegrated and, experts say, segregation is a primary driver in creating economic and social disparities and straining relations between police and the communities they serve.

The enduring forms of segregation — and in the case of many schools, resegregation — contribute to mistrust between the races and a lack of understanding and empathy, and can lead to violent encounters between law enforcement authorities and residents.

The writer failed to notice the hilarious coincidence in this sentence:

“You’re kind of looking at the greatest hits of segregation: Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis,” says Myron Orfield, director of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, referring to the police killings of Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, and Castile.

The places that integrated first, and were most diverse, are the ones now heading in separate directions. He forgot to mention Los Angeles, home of the Rodney King PCP-fueled rampage and ensuing beatdown and riots, and Houston, which is basically a collection of ethnic camps where different groups live apart from one another.

But across the country, different groups are separating in part because, now that race is not a matter of black and white but hundreds of different groups, each group is seeking a community where its standards, aesthetics, values and leadership can prevail:

In research I conducted with Siri Warkentien, another sociologist, we used a statistical model and census data to identify the most common changes in racial composition in 10,681 neighborhoods in metropolitan L.A., Houston, Chicago and New York, beginning as far back as 1970 in some areas. That starting point corresponds with the implementation of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, which protects buyers and renters from discrimination in choosing where to live.

…The data show that vast portions of south and east Los Angeles are slipping from mixed populations toward single race populations. And the change has not just occurred in formerly white areas. One of the trajectories that we identified followed a similar pattern in neighborhoods that were once black. Compton residents were nearly three-quarters black in 1980; by 1990, the mix was about 52% black and 43% Latino; in 2014, two-thirds Latino. Such slow but steadily increasing Latino growth can be found in 46% of the neighborhoods we studied in the Los Angeles metropolitan region.

…Our research found that this process is occurring again in Southern California, but this time among immigrants from Asia, the source of the largest number of U.S. newcomers now. For example, the Asian proportion of the population in Cerritos increased from 44% in 1990 to 58% in 2000 to 62% in 2014. It appears to be following a path toward Asian segregation much like Covina is on the path to Latino segregation.

Some media sources quietly acknowledged the role of “white flight” in the resegregation of the suburbs:

Our research finds that neighborhoods that are more than about 30 percent non-white, within a couple of decades, two-thirds of them will become predominantly non-white.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that people realize that racially mixed schools tend to be less effective and more violent and so they are moving to places with people like them:

Following Brown v Board of Education and some subsequent Supreme Court rulings, we had a pretty rapid period of de-segregation, particularly in the South. But it came because of court orders and starting in the 1980s you began to see court orders being lifted, and as communities were no longer forced to integrate, they’ve started to do things that re-segregate students.

Outside of the South we’ve never seen any real effort to integrate schools and so in places like Chicago, New York City, Boston, Newark, where you saw white parents pulling out of the public school system and moving to the suburbs, this has led to increasing segregation in those cities as well.

The same is true of other races, even though the media focuses on white flight from the mixed-race suburb. However, results vary by race, and this includes what people put their energy into in each community. What people value, they work on achieving. This is called “social investment” and different groups care about different things, leading to unequal priorities in different communities.

A side effect of the “new” post-desegregation white flight is the creation of whitopias, or places that are majority white and have more of a traditional American social fabric and framework of social investment:

Imagine moving to a place where you can leave your front door unlocked as you run your errands, where the community enjoys a winning ratio of playgrounds to potholes, where you can turn your kids loose at 3 p.m., not to worry, then see them in time for supper, where the neighbors greet those children by name, where your trouble-free high school feels like a de facto private school, where if you decide to play hooky from work, you can drive just twenty minutes and put your sailboat on the water, where the outdoor serenity is shattered only by each seagull’s cry, where you can joyride your off-road vehicles (Snowmobiles! ATVs! Mountain bikes! Rock crawlers!) on Nature’s bold terrain, where your family and abundant friends feel close to the soil, and where suburban blight has yet to spoil your vistas. Just imagine.

If you could move to such a place, would you?

If so, you would join a growing number of white Americans homesteading in a constellation of small towns and so-called “exurbs” that are extremely white. They are creating communal pods that cannily preserve a white-bread world, a throwback to an imagined past with “authentic” 1950s values and the nifty suburban amenities available today.

Instead of focusing on the negative, let us flip this around: do all races want the same thing? What is a white utopia to some will be a cultural wasteland to others, focused on insipid Mayberry style goofy American Caucasian living. This is why people are breaking apart, and the big story that the media is dodging is the re-segregation of America.

Tags: desegregation, diversity, multiculturalism, reparations-with-repatriation, resegregation, segregation, whitopia